Walking to school is not in today's lesson plan

OK, a tad of an exaggeration. I did walk from the school bus drop off, and it was uphill for the last long haul home. It was a killer in waist-deep snow.

I'll stop now.

Here we are (a pause to allow parents to whoop with joy) at the onset of back-to-school season. We're dealing with elementary and high school students. College kids have probably already settled in and said goodbye to the "rents." (Are they gone yet?)

Today's hovering, helicopter parents in my neck of the woods already have their undies in a wedgie because their kids have to walk to school, sort of.

Not having children in the local school system any more, but still shelling out 60-plus percent of my obscene property taxes so we can pay a Sandbox 101 assistant principal six figures, there is the almost irresistible urge to climb aboard my high horse (always tethered nearby) and spout the "when I was your age" speech.

While some kids do actually walk from their homes to the schoolhouse, they're in a distinct minority. Studies say that 66 percent of students walked to and from school 40 years ago; today it's about 13 percent.

Times have changed for sure, and it's a dangerous world out there. It always has been, but we didn't learn of the lunatics in nanoseconds on social media.

The problem I have with the local issue is that the kids are not even walking to school; they're only hoofing it to the bus stop, for pity's sake.

The reason is money. It's always about money.

Thus, the local school district says it doesn't have the dough to continue to provide "courtesy" busing to students. It is required by law, of course, to pick up and deliver kids who live x-number of feet, miles, etc. from the schoolhouse. For those who don't, the district did the goodwill drill and picked up the kids anyway, practically at their doorstep. No more.

Therefore the parents are steamed that the big yellow bus no longer swings into their yuppie, ticky-tack, townhouse lined cul-de-sac to fetch their pampered kiddies.

That means the children actually have to put one foot in front of the other to get to the bus stop.

The horror of it all.

One outraged and obviously overwrought mother wailed, "our kids would be road kill before they got to school."

Get a grip, lady.

This is where the "when I was your age" flashback comes into focus.

Rather than pontificate about how tough it was back in the day with fuzzy anecdotal evidence, I actually went back and measured the exact distance I walked from front door to the elementary school bus stop and also the route I took from the high school bus drop off to home

Total distance: Seven-tenths of a mile. I was a little disappointed. It seemed so much longer in 1960. But there were no sidewalks.

I then checked out the route I took from the house to the grade school bus stop. It was just short of half a mile. So there's a mile a day, almost.

So like most kids of my generation, shuffling off to school was no big deal.

It probably wouldn't hurt modern mommy and daddy to get off their over-protective, widening duffs either, walk along with their children and quit whining about it.